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AXA HK, 2022-23

How to optimise CMS ecosystem for streamlining campaigns, enabling customization and data collection? 

My Tasks: Product Design, User Research, UXUI design

Case study: Redesign the CMS ecosystem for the Emma by AXA app to optimize the workflow process.

Overview

Project Background

As Emma expanded to onboard General Insurance users, we launched more promotional campaigns and introduced free hook products. However, the CMS (Content Management System) we were using at the time was shared with the Corporate website team which had significant limitations:

  1. making it difficult to personalize promotions for different customer groups.

  2. Rely on the workforce of the website team to launch the campaign

  3. Low flexibilities on the enhancement of the campaign’s templates.

We decided to build a brand new CMS for EMMA by AXA app.

My Role

  • Conducted user interviews to understand the business users’ expectations of the CMS, and studied the clients’ unhappy experiences with our campaigns on the app.

  • Design on the usage of CMS

  • Design the workflow of personalising target group

Collaboration teams

  1. Vicky Man (Business Analyst)

    • Prepared business requirements & users’ stories

  2. Vincent Leung, Nelson Wong and his team (Technical team representative)

    • Conducted the proof of concept

    • Studied the technical workflow of user group segmentation and Salesforce integration;

    • Developed the CMS and frontend templates

  3. Kara Wong and his team (Data analytical team)

    • Prepared a tracking plan for developing the campaign’s successful matrix measurement.

Research

Topic

Explore ways of enhancing our CMS functionalities for greater flexibility in launching timely market campaigns while reducing reliance on development teams for each campaign push.

Research and Methodology

1. Interview our stakeholders

​Research questions

  • Learn their difficulties with using the old CMS

  • Understand their ideal way of selecting the target audience and current limitation

2. Interview the technical team to understand the existing process of grouping the target audience

  • In the EMMA by AXA app, different types of policyholders can use the relevant policy features of their policy category. Since policyholders can purchase a new policy or withdraw their existing policy at any time, the feature list on the app's homepage should be updated whenever users login to the app.

​Key stakeholders

​

  • Senior Distribution Digital Support Manager

  • Digital Customer Engagement Manager

  • Data analytics & insights manager

  • Business Analyst who is in charge of setting up the campaign

  • Research questions

    1. What is the existing process of updating the feature list of policyholders?

    2. Could we reuse a similar method for grouping campaign target audiences?

    3. What is the existing process of creating a campaign in Salesforce?

What have we found existing problems?

  1. High workload on setting up a single campaign

  • A single template could not support bilingual language. Therefore, the business analyst needed to create double files for bilingual versions.

    • If the business team has selected multiple locations inside the app to promote the campaign such as 4 locations, she should create 8 files to maintain one campaign.

    • This caused a high risk of file miss-updated issues during the approval process.
       

  • There was no complete and comprehensive testing environment for the business team to review the campaign layout and content during the approval process. After sign-off, the business analyst needed to create the campaign in a live environment again. The above effort will be double.

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2. High dependence on the development team for the following items:

  • Control the visibility of the advertisement on different pages of the app

  • Setting the target audience

  • Campaign launching time needs to stick with production release.

3. The existing process of grouping the target audience

The campaign manager needed to ask the data science team to select target audiences by providing certain criteria. Then, he passed the list of eligible policyholders to the development team and enabled the campaign for eligible policyholders through production release. This increases the difficulties of pushing timely campaigns to react to the market trend.

4. The existing process of updating the feature list of policyholders (high-level concept)

  • The policyholders' status is updated daily. They will be assigned into different groups by line of business to access corresponding features.

  • We could on-top to define the group by gender, birthday, line of business, and policy status.

5. The existing weakness of Salesforce

  • As real-time quota checking had not been reflected on CMS, BA needs to monitor the campaign quota in Salesforce at midnight if the event is popular.

  • Prismic (the front-end development framework of the CMS) cannot proactively check the Salesforce data so it cannot check the campaign status when the user clicks on the campaign page.

Stakeholders’ expectations of the new content management system

Low dependency on the technical side

  • A CMS should allow for the launch of ads at any time

  • It offers high control over the frequency of ad appearances, their locations, and the audience that can view them

  • The system should allow users to modify the content easily at any point

  • It provides a safe content-reviewing and testing environment

  • It allows for the quick withdrawal of ads in case of any emergency.

Types of templates

  • Different locations of advertisement:

    • Pop-up

    • Pre-login page

    • Ads on Homepage

    • Ads in “My Privileges”

  • Campaign details page

  • Event forms

  • Confirmation page

  • Error page

  • Terms and conditions page

  • Quiz game journey

Solutions

To address this, I collaborated with the BA, IT, and Data teams to design a new CMS system from scratch.

Goals

​The new system should able to support:

  • Customer segmentation

  • Customizable ad placements

  • Pre-integration with Salesforce

  • High flexibility in the design of campaign pages, which supports the following types of campaign journeys:

    • Free insurance product subscription

    • Event subscription

    • Quiz game journey

    • Service subscription

This reduced reliance on developers and made marketing campaigns more efficient and personalized.

Target Deliverables

  1. CMS dashboard design

  2. POC of new workflow of customer segmentation

  3. Solution of real-time quota

  4. The following templates design:

    • Different locations of advertisement:

      • Pop-up

      • Pre-login page

      • Ads on Homepage

      • Ads in “My Privileges”

    • Campaign details page

    • Event forms

    • Confirmation page

    • Error page

    • Terms and conditions page

Design Dashboard

  1. Define the function of the dashboard in the CMS.

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Ideal Workflow on Customer Segmentation

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Limitation

Set the target group through CMS

I would like to allow users to define the audience criteria in the CMS. These criteria included: campaign_id, group_id, age range, location, and line of business. They should be converted into a JSON file, and sent to the “Policy Lake (fake name)” to filter eligible policyholders. I suggested developing an API as a connector to read the JSON in the policy lake, as I believe this could be reusable for future automation processes.

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The idea was doable but it was put on the wish list, because API team and technical team have given reasonable reasons:

  • The calculation cost associated with age combined with the line of business is high. As you know, the number of eligible audiences changes daily based on age, which makes it a dynamic criterion for eligibility checking. This variability significantly impacts subsequent analysis work.

 

  • Switching from using age ranges to birth year ranges could be an improvement. However, if multiple campaigns are running simultaneously, the eligibility checking process during login could become burdensome.

 

Conclusion: this idea should be rethought together with login eligibility checking.

Journey of Real-time Quota

Digital enhancement:​

  1. We added a webhook at the CMS to listen the outbound message from Salesforce.

  2. Added a status validation when the app homepage on load.

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The following diagram shows how the real-time quota function work:

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When the webhook got the outbound message which ask for changing the campaign status from "ON" to "OFF", the status will be reflected on the front-end layout.

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Design Template

To prevent any misunderstanding by the development team regarding my design and content modelling structure, I provided not only the template layout but also detailed the content modelling structures, reusable slices, and the configuration of those slices. This way, both the Business Analyst and I could understand how to use the CMS before the development was completed, while the development team were standing on the same page with us.

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Reflection: Balancing Usability and Cost in CMS Design

During the process of designing the SMS system, I had discussions with various departments. Through these conversations, I realized there were several areas where I needed to rethink how to create a cost-effective CMS.

 

Design Conflicts between BA and Developers

In the past, when designers worked on similar projects, clients often focused only on the layout design and overlooked the usability of CMS. However, during this project, I noticed two key concerns repeatedly brought up by the developers and business analysts (BAs):

  • Business Analysts (BA): "The previous CMS was so hard to use that it took ages just to create a post."

  • Developers: "My biggest worry is building a completed function feature that end-up not being used."

It became clear to me that when developers design features, they also consider the cost of development. Designing a well-rounded feature can be much more resource-intensive than we might imagine, so they naturally weigh whether it's worth the effort to fully implement a feature.

​

My Approach: Finding common ground

To address these challenges, the first step was to understand the future promotion plan from the customer engagement team. According to their plan, we prioritise designing the event page and refining the customer segmentation process. These areas were critical because they directly impact the time effectively and the cost of launching a campaign. We also provided developers with a clear understanding of the business needs. This approach ensured that the features developed were both practical for end users and justified in terms of development cost.

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My learning

Looking back, this project taught me the importance of finding common ground between business goals and technical feasibility. By fostering collaboration and focusing on key pain points, I was able to guide the team toward a solution that balanced usability and cost-effectiveness. This experience has deepened my understanding of how thoughtful design and communication can drive successful outcomes

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